India After Independence: 1947-2000 (64 page)

    1. The ceiling for double-cropped perennially irrigated land was to be within the range of ten to eighteen acres, it was twenty-seven acres for
single-cropped land and fifty-four acres for inferior dry lands.

2. A ceiling was to be applicable to a family as a unit of five members, (husband, wife and three minor children). Additional land per additional member could be permitted for families which exceeded this number but up to a maximum limit of double the ceiling for the five member unit.

3. In the distribution of surplus land, priority was to be given to landless agricultural workers, particularly those belonging to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

4. Compensation payable for surplus land was to be fixed well below market price so as to be within the capacity of the new allottees.

    Following the 1972 guidelines most states (barring some north-eastern states and Goa which had no ceiling laws) passed revised ceiling legislation, lowering the ceiling limits within the range prescribed in the guidelines. Resistance to the ceiling laws and efforts to evade the ceiling continued in a variety of ways. A common method was to seek judicial intervention on a number of grounds. Hundreds of thousands of ceiling cases were filed in the courts all over the country. One estimate mentions five hundred thousand pending cases in Andhra Pradesh alone!

In an attempt to stem this menace the government got the 34th Amendment to the Constitution passed in parliament in August 1974, getting most of the revised ceiling laws included in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution so that they could not be challenged on constitutional grounds.

While the renewed effort of the seventies did lead to some progress in surplus land being redistributed, the overall results were still far from satisfactory. As a result of the ceiling laws of the seventies, an additional area of about 2.27 million acres of land was distributed by the early eighties, but, quite symptomatic of the entire effort at ceiling reform, an estimated 32.25 million acres of land was willfully dispersed to avoid ceilings.

Nevertheless, by March 1985, 7.2 million acres were declared surplus out of which 4.3 million acres were distributed to about 3.3 million beneficiaries. Moreover, more than half, 54.6 per cent of the beneficiaries were members of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes who received about 43.6 per cent of the area distributed. The objective set out in the 1947 economic programme of the Congress, of distributing surplus lands to village cooperatives or of even using such lands to start new cooperatives did not achieve any success. Out of the land declared surplus but not distributed, nearly 1.6 million acres was under litigation.

There was wide regional variation in the implementation of ceiling laws, with the states, where greater political mobilization of the targeted beneficiaries occurred, or where greater political will was shown by the government, achieving a much higher levels of success. For example, it is estimated that West Bengal, which had only less than 3 per cent of the cultivated area in India, contributed about a quarter of the total land declared surplus under ceiling laws all over India.

By the middle of 1992, the area declared surplus was 7.3 million acres (it was 2.4 million acres in 1970) and the area distributed was about 5 million acres (it was 1.2 million acres in 1970) and the beneficiaries numbered about 4.7 million. The increase in the number of beneficiaries particularly between 1985 and 1992 was far greater than the rise in area distributed, 1.4 million beneficiaries and 0.1 million acres respectively. This suggests that the new beneficiaries would be receiving only tiny plots or homestead lands.

Thus, while there was a distinct improvement after 1972, yet, the total area declared surplus that could be distributed among the landless constituted only about 2 per cent of the cultivated area. Again, while it is true that more than four and a half million people, mostly landless, did receive some land (however poor its quality and however small the size of the holding), the inequities in Indian agriculture, which the ceiling laws were intended to address, persisted to a very large extent.

An important impact of the ceiling laws, and perhaps in the long run the most critical one, was that it killed the land market and prevented an increasing concentration in landholdings through de-peasantisation. As the eminent scholar of Indian agriculture and policy-maker, C.H. Hanumantha Rao, put it, ‘The law discouraged concentration of landownership beyond the ceiling level and thus prevented the possible dispossession of numerous small and marginal holders which would probably have occurred through a competitive process in the land market in the absence of a ceiling on landholdings.’
⁷

Also, though the opportunity to acquire large areas of surplus lands for redistribution was missed because of defective and delayed ceiling laws, in the long run the high population growth and the rapid subdivision of large holdings over several generations (in the absence of the practice of primogeniture for inheritance in India) led automatically to little land remaining over the ceiling limits. In fact, the number of holdings and the area operated under the category of large holdings, 25 acres or above (even 15 acres and above) kept falling in the decades since independence right upto the nineties. Except in certain small pockets in the country, very large landholdings of the semi-feudal type are now things of the past. Inequality among landowners was no longer a key issue, as landholding was not very skewed any more. By one estimate, by 1976-77 nearly 97 per cent of the operated holdings were below 25 acres and 87 per cent of the holdings were below 10 acres.
⁸
The problem of the landless or the near landless, who it is estimated constituted nearly half the agricultural population still required urgent attention.

However, any further attempt at land redistribution through lowering of ceilings does not appear to be politically feasible or even economically viable. Given the adverse land-man ratio in India and particularly given (unlike many other countries with similar ratios) the fact that a very high proportion of the population continues to be dependent on agriculture (nearly 67 per cent of the total workforce was engaged in agriculture in 1991) and that consequently the number of potential competitors for land
is very large, any attempt to further reduce ceilings to provide land for the landless labourers would vastly increase the number of uneconomic and unviable holdings. Also, it would range the entire, now politically very important, landowning classes, powerfully mobilized under the ‘new’ farmers’ movement, against any regime which tried to do so. As an eminent radical journalist said to us recently, ‘Only a Pol Pot can try to do land redistribution on the basis of land to the tiller today.’

Perhaps the only viable programme left for the landless was the one which has been to some extent taken up in recent years, of distributing homestead lands or even just home sites, ensuring the payment of minimum wages, as well as providing security of tenure and fair rents to sharecroppers and tenants.
⁹
Other answers are to be found in increasing off-farm employment in rural areas, in increasing animal husbandry and other activities associated with cultivation but not requiring land.

Bhoodan was an attempt at land reform, at bringing about institutional changes in agriculture, like land redistribution through a movement and not simply through government legislation. Eminent Gandhian constructive worker, Acharya Vinoba Bhave, drew upon Gandhian techniques and ideas such as constructive work and trusteeship to launch this movement in the early fifties. Unfortunately, its revolutionary potential has generally been missed.

Vinoba Bhave organized an all-India federation of constructive workers, the Sarvodaya Samaj, which was to take up the task of a non-violent social transformation in the country. He and his followers were to do padayatra, walk on foot from village to village to persuade the larger landowners to donate at least one-sixth of their lands as bhoodan or ‘land-gift’ for distribution among the landless and the land poor. The target was to get as donation 50 million acres, which was one-sixth of the 300 million acres of cultivable land in India. The idea was that each average family of five should give up one-sixth of their land accepting the poor landless man as a member of the family.

The movement, though independent of the government, had the support of the Congress, with the AICC urging Congressmen to participate in it actively. Eminent former Congressman and now a prominent leader of the PSP (Praja Socialist Party), Jayaprakash Narayan, withdrew from active politics to join the Bhoodan Movement in 1953.

Vinoba received the first donation of land on 18 April 1951 in the village of Pochampalli in the Telengana region of Andhra Pradesh, where the reverberations of the Communist Party-led armed peasant revolt were still being felt. In less than three months he had covered about 200 villages in this region and received 12,200 acres as donation. The movement then spread to the North, particularly Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. In the initial years the movement achieved a considerable degree of success, receiving
over four million acres of land as donation by March 1956. After this the movement lost momentum and very little new land was received as donations.

Also, a substantial part of the land donated was unfit for cultivation or under litigation. Perhaps this was one reason why out of the nearly four and half million acres of Bhoodan land available only about 654 thousand acres were actually distributed among 200 thousand families by the end of 1957. By early 1961, about 872 thousand acres of land had been distributed.

Meanwhile, towards of the end of 1955, the movement took a new form, that of Gramdan or ‘donation of village’. Again taking off from the Gandhian notion that all land belonged to ‘Gopal or God, in Gramdan villages the movement declared that all land was owned collectively or equally, as it did not belong to any one individual. The movement started in Orissa and was most successful there. By the end of 1960 there were more than four and a half thousand Gramdan villages out which 1,946 were in Orissa, 603 in Maharashtra, 543 in Kerala, 483 in Andhra Pradesh and about 250 in Madras. It has been argued that this movement was successful mainly in villages where class differentiation had not yet emerged and there was little if any disparity in ownership of land or other property, such as those inhabited by certain tribal communities. Vinoba is said to have picked such villages for this movement.

By the sixties the Bhoodan/Gramdan Movement had lost its elan despite its considerable initial promise. Its creative potential essentially remained unutilized. The programme, however, appeared to drag on indefinitely, essentially forgotten but for rude reminders such as the Bihar government decision of June 1999 to dissolve the State Bhoodan Committee for its inability to distribute even half the Bhoodan land available over the past 38 years!
¹⁰

A proper assessment of the movement particularly its potential is still to be made. It has been too easily dismissed as not only ‘utopian’ but also as being reactionary, class collaborationist and aimed at preventing class struggle. As one historian of agrarian reforms in India put it, its purpose was to ‘serve as a brake on the revolutionary struggle of the peasants.’
¹¹
This is not surprising as far more successful movements led by Gandhiji continue to be wrongly characterized in this fashion by some sections for having based themselves on similar principles.

There were however some very significant aspects of the Bhoodan Movement that need to be noted. First, the very fact that it was one of the very few attempts after independence to bring about land reform through a movement and not through government legislation from the top is in itself very significant. Second, the potential of the movement was enormous, based as it was on the idea of trusteeship or that all land belonged to God. If the landlords failed to behave as trustees or as ‘equal’ sharers of property, then a satyagraha, in the Gandhian mould, could be launched against them. This, for example, was precisely what the Tamil Nadu Sarvodaya leaders proposed to do in 1961: ‘Start satyagraha against
landlords who refused to cooperate in Gramdan villages and went back on their promises to donate land.’
¹²
There were some including a section of Socialists influenced by Gandhian thought and practice (many of them were in the PSP in the early fifties) who wanted to realize the revolutionary potential of the notion of trusteeship and of constructive work through the technique of satyagraha by launching mass civil disobedience against injustice. The Sarvodaya Samaj, however, on the whole failed to make this transition: to build an active large-scale mass movement that would generate irresistible pressure for social transformation in large parts of the country.

Yet, the movement made a significant contribution by creating a moral ambience, an atmosphere, which, while putting pressure on the landlords, created conditions favourable to the landless. This was recognized even by the noted Communist leader E.M.S. Namboodiripad. Citing an article by Namboodiripad titled ‘Sarvodya and Communism,’ Kotovsky wrote:
¹³

the Bhoodan and Gramdan movement . . . has . . . to a certain extent stimulated political and other activity by the peasant masses and has created a favourable atmosphere for political propaganda and agitation for redistribution of the land, for abolition of private ownership of land and for the development of agricultural producers’ cooperatives.

This, ironically, is perhaps the best appreciation of the significance of the Bhoodan Movement coming from those who have been its major critics.

A wide spectrum of the national movement’s leaders including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, the Socialists and Communists was agreed that cooperativization would lead to major improvement in Indian agriculture and would particularly benefit the poor. Cooperativization was therefore seen as an important element in the agenda for institutional changes sought to be achieved through land reform. However, as in the case of the land ceiling issue, there was no general consensus, particularly among the peasantry, on the question of cooperatives. Correctly reflecting this situation, the Congress at independence made very tentative proposals—like the state making efforts to organize ‘
pilot schemes for experimenting with cooperative farming
among small holders-on government unoccupied but cultivable lands.’
¹
Further, it was clarified that any move towards cooperativization was to be through persuasion, by getting the goodwill and agreement of the peasantry. No force or compulsion was visualized.

The recommendations in July 1949 of the Congress Agrarian Reforms Committee, called the Kumarappa Committee after its chairman, showed the first signs that the Congress could push beyond the existing consensus. The committee recommended that ‘the State should be
empowered to enforce
the application of varying degrees of cooperation for different types of farming. Thus, while the family farmer
will have
to make use of the multipurpose co-operative society for marketing, credit, and other matters, the below-basic holder (i.e., peasant with small uneconomic holding)
will have
to cultivate his farm jointly with such other holders.’
²
For the first time there was a suggestion of compulsion being used to promote cooperatives and the committee assumed the ‘gradualness of the programme, intelligent propaganda, liberal state-aid and its judicious implementation by a specially trained cadre would to a great extent reduce the psychological hesitation of the farmer to take to the co-operative patterns recommended by the committee.’
³
This was a hasty assumption, as later events were to show.

The First Plan approached the issue more judiciously and recommended
that small and medium farms in particular should be
encouraged and assisted
to group themselves into cooperative farming societies. The Plan did not talk of any enforcing powers to the state though it did envisage some amount of compulsion when it suggested that if a majority of the owners and occupancy tenants in a village, owning at least half the land of the village, wished to enter upon cooperative management of the land of the village, then their decision should be binding on the village as a whole.

The early planners had hoped that the village panchayat activated by motivated party workers and aided by the trained workers of the newly launched Community Development programme (in October 1952) would not only help implement rural development projects but would help bring about critical
institutional changes
in Indian agriculture, for example by assisting in the implementation of land reforms, by organizing voluntary labour for community work and by setting up of cooperatives. Further, there was a high and growing level of expectation, in the initial years, regarding how much such institutional changes, particularly cooperativization, would substitute for investment outlay in agriculture, in achieving the planned targets of rapid increases in agricultural production.

The Second Plan reflected this expectation by declaring that ‘the main task during the Second Five-Year Plan is to take such essential steps as will provide sound foundations for the development of cooperative farming so that
over a period of ten years or so a substantial proportion of agricultural lands are cultivated on cooperative lines.
’
⁴
However, even the ambitious plan (considering that no coercion was envisaged) of having a ‘substantial’ proportion of agricultural lands under cooperatives within ten years soon appeared to be too modest once exaggerated reports started pouring in of the dramatic increases in agricultural output achieved by China through measures such as cooperativization. (It was many years later, after Mao’s death in 1976, that this myth was destroyed. By one estimate, China’s agricultural growth rate between 1954 and 1974 was only 2 per cent, which was actually lower than India’s, which was 2.5 per cent.)

In the middle of 1956 two Indian delegations, (one of the Planning Commission, the other of the Union Ministry of Food and Agriculture), consisting of leaders of the cooperative movement in India, members of parliament, bureaucrats involved with cooperatives, technical experts and planners, were sent to China to study how they organized their cooperatives and achieved such rapid increases in agricultural output. Underlying these visits was the feeling that the targets of agricultural growth envisaged by the Second Plan were inadequate and required an upward revision and the Chinese experience could show how these targets could be achieved without significant increases in outlay.

The two delegations arrived at quite similar conclusions. It was reported that China had achieved remarkable increases in foodgrains production and extension of the agricultural infrastructure through cooperativization. They both recommended (barring the minute of dissent
by two members of one committee) a bold programme of extending cooperative farming in India. Jawaharlal Nehru, who was deeply committed to the idea of cooperativization, started putting pressure on the states to emulate the Chinese example and commit to higher food production on the basis of institutional changes in agriculture, i.e., without demanding additional funds for investment in agriculture. The National Development Council and the AICC now set targets even higher than the one envisaged by the Second Plan, proposing that in the next five years agricultural production be increased by 25 to 35 per cent if not more, mainly by bringing about major institutional changes in agriculture such as cooperativization. The states, however, resisted any large-scale plan for cooperativization, agreeing only to experiments in cooperative farming and that too if they remained strictly voluntary.

The Congress under Nehru’s persuasion continued to mount pressure in favour of an agricultural strategy based critically on institutional change. The Congress pressure culminated in the famous Nagpur Resolution passed at the party’s Nagpur session in January 1959. The Nagpur Resolution clearly stated that ‘the organization of the village should be based on village panchayats and village cooperatives, both of which should have adequate powers and resources to discharge the functions allotted to them.’ Further, the Resolution stated:
⁵

The future agrarian pattern should be that of
cooperative joint farming,
in which the
land would be pooled for joint cultivation,
the farmers continuing to retain their property rights, and getting a share of the net produce in proportion to their land. Further, those who actually work on the land, whether they own the land or not, will get a share in proportion to the work put in by them on the joint farm.

As a first step, prior to the institution of joint farming, service cooperatives should be organised throughout the country. This stage should be completed within a period of three years. Even within this period, however, wherever possible and generally agreed to by the farmers, joint cultivation may be started.

A big leap was involved here. Not only did the Nagpur Resolution visualize an agrarian pattern based on joint cooperative farming in the future, it specified that such a pattern was
to be achieved within three years.
The proposal for introducing cooperatives, which was being made since the mid-forties, could no longer be treated as just another radical recommendation with no concrete programme for its implementation. A wave of opposition, both within and outside the Congress, followed this recommendation.

Criticising the Press and the parliament, which was convened shortly after, the Nagpur session, argued that the Resolution was the first step towards ending private property and to eventual expropriation of the landed classes and that it would lead to forced collectivization on the
Soviet or Chinese pattern. From within the Congress party senior leaders like C. Rajagopalachari, N.G. Ranga and others like Charan Singh mobilized opinion in the party and outside and mounted an open attack saying that a totalitarian, Communist programmme was being thrust upon the country.

Faced with serious division within the party, Nehru struck a conciliatory note, assuring the parliament in February 1959 that there was no question of using any coercion to introduce cooperatives and that no new law or act was going to be passed by parliament on this question. He only reiterated his personal conviction that cooperative farming was desirable and that he would continue to try and convince the peasants, without whose consent the programmme could not be implemented.

The Chinese repression in Tibet in March 1959, and more so the Chinese encroachments inside the Indian border a few months later, were not only a personal loss of face and prestige for Nehru but also made any plan which smacked of the China model automatically suspect and very difficult to push publicly. A further retreat became inevitable and the Congress put forward a position in parliament which essentially argued for setting up ‘
service cooperatives
’ all over the country over the next three years and left the issue of setting up cooperative farms sufficiently vague. Cooperative farms were to be set up
voluntarily
wherever conditions became mature.

The Congress was aware that even the task of setting up service cooperatives all over the country in three years was a gigantic effort requiring the setting up of 6000 new cooperatives every month for a period of three years! The AICC decided to establish a training center for Congress workers who would play a key role in organising service cooperatives, and the Provincial Congress Committees were directed to do the same. The provincial Congress leaders simply ignored the directive and despite the efforts of the Congress president, Indira Gandhi, the AICC training programme did not get off the ground and was eventually altogether abandoned after June 1959.

The Third Plan, in sharp contrast to the Second, reflected the mellowed position regarding cooperativization and took a very pragmatic and cautious approach. As regards cooperative farming, it accepted a modest target of setting up ten pilot projects per district. At the same time it put in the caveat that ‘cooperative farming has to grow out of the success of the general agricultural effort through the community development movement, the progress of cooperation in credit, marketing, distribution and processing, the growth of rural industry, and the fulfillment of the objectives of land reform.’
⁶
This sounded like a wishful platitude not a plan of action.

Given the policy stalemate reached, it is not surprising that the progress that the cooperative movement made in India by and large fell far short of the
goals set by its early proponents. Most of the weaknesses that Daniel Thorner, the noted economist, had observed during his survey of 117 of the ‘best’ cooperatives all over India between December 1958 and May 1959 remained largely true in the years to come. Another economist and observer of India’s land reforms, Wolf Ladejinsky, made similar observations for the sixties and seventies.

As for joint farming, two types of cooperatives were observed. First, there were those that were formed essentially to evade land reforms and access incentives offered by the state. Typically, these cooperatives were formed by well-to-do, influential families who took on a number of agricultural labourers or ex-tenants as bogus members. Forming a cooperative helped evade the ceiling laws or tenancy laws. The influential members got the lands tilled by the bogus members who were essentially engaged as wage labour or tenants. Moreover, forming these bogus cooperatives enabled the influential families to take advantage of the substantial financial assistance offered by the state in the form of a subsidy, as well as get priority for acquiring scarce agricultural inputs like fertilizers, improved seeds and even tractors, etc.

Second, there were the state-sponsored cooperative farms in the form of pilot projects, where generally poor, previously uncultivated land was made available to the landless, Harijans, displaced persons and such underprivileged groups. The poor quality of land, lack of proper irrigation facility, etc., and the fact that these farms were run like government-sponsored projects rather than genuine, motivated, joint efforts of the cultivators led them to be generally expensive unsuccessful experiments. The expected rise in productivity and benefits of scale, which is a major
raison d’être
of cooperative farming, was not in evidence in these farms.

In any case, the hope that the service cooperatives would facilitate the transition to cooperative farming was completely belied. Cooperative farming had spread to negligible levels beyond the government projects and the bogus cooperatives.

The service cooperatives, which fared much better than the farming cooperatives, also suffered from some major shortcomings. To begin with, the service cooperatives not only reflected the iniquitous structure of the Indian countryside but also tended to reinforce it. Typically, the leadership of the cooperatives, i.e., its president, secretary and treasurer, consisted of the leading family or families of the village which not only owned a great deal of land but also controlled trade and moneylending. These well-to-do families, the ‘big people’ or the ‘all in alls’ of the village, were thus able to corner for themselves scarce agricultural inputs, including credit. In fact, quite often, low interest agricultural credit made available through cooperative rural banks was used by such families for non-agricultural businesses, consumption and even moneylending! It was a case of public subsidy being used by a non-target group for private investment. To the extent that Congress and other political formations with similar objectives, viz., the Socialists and the Communists, failed to use the political space provided at the grassroots level by the panchayats, the Community
Development programme and the cooperatives in favour of the underprivileged in the countryside, by mobilizing them into action, these institutions were taken over by the dominant sections in the village, who used them to further buttress their economic and political influence.